When I met a Pakistani

It is in their unsaid and unspoken bewilderment that Pakistani visitors in India speak the most.

It was February 2005. The Pakistani poet Harris Khalique, whom I had been in touch with over the internet, had sent me copies of a book of his poems through someone. The carrier of poems was visiting Delhi to attend the seventh convention of the Pakistan India People’s Forum for Peace and Democracy (PIPFPD).

I was overcome with joy at the thought that I’d get to meet so many Pakistanis!

I don’t know why I always felt the need to meet a Pakistani or two. To answer the question ‘Who am I?’, politically and personally, I had to meet Pakistanis. Perhaps, it had something to do with being a second generation Partition refugee, growing up in a colony in Lucknow full of Partition refugees, who were conscious even in the ‘90s that they were ‘from’ a place now forbidden to them. Or perhaps, my curiosity about Pakistanis had to do with the sense of loss that one felt amongst Muslims.

I entered the PIPFPD convention only to find it full of people who looked alike. It was impossible to tell a Pakistani from an Indian! I asked one if he had come from Pakistan, but he replied that he was from Delhi. I didn’t know where to hide at that embarrassment. Imagine asking an Indian if he’s a Pakistani! I quickly asked around for the carrier of poems and returned to my college hostel.

Since then, I have met countless Pakistanis, even though I have never been to Pakistan. Social media has helped make dear friends of absolute strangers. I love to take visiting Pakistanis around Delhi. In the things they notice and those they don’t, in the questions they ask and the ones they answer, I get to see my city and country through their eyes. It’s a fascinating exercise.

If it’s their first visit, many Pakistanis want to visit old Delhi to see if people there still speak Ghalib-like Urdu. They soon give up on that. Only those mad about shopping like to visit Dilli Haat. Mostly, Pakistanis like to visit two holy shrines, Dargah Nizamuddin and Khan Market. They miss the plaque with Allama Iqbal’s couplet in Nizamuddin and don’t realise that Khan Market, established in 1952, is named after Khan Abdul Jabbar Khan, Badshah Khan’s elder brother and West Pakistan’s first chief minister.

It is in their unsaid and unspoken bewilderment that Pakistani visitors speak the most. This place that feels familiar and yet isn’t home, this place where people speak the same language and yet a different one, this city that feels like Lahore, yet no one knows the word faarigh, this city of Hazrat Nizamuddin Aulia’s and Humayun’s tombs, where most people have names only like in Bollywood and the news. It leaves them a bit dazed and disoriented.

I met the non-practising Muslim Pakistani, who felt blessed offering Eid prayers at Delhi’s Jama Masjid, and I met the religious Pakistani, who stopped to see a Hindu temple, perhaps a first sight. I met the Urdu writer, who wanted to know if Indian Muslims cheer for Pakistan in cricket and war, and I met the Lahori Communist who didn’t want his notion of secular India shattered. I met the Pakistani hungry to learn about India and the Pakistani who didn’t want his pre-existing notions of India to be challenged.

They are surprised to see women driving scooties and find the food disappointing, and insist Pakistanis are better looking. Yet, they must return with Haldiram’s kaju katli, and some wonder about a Veer-Zaara story of their own. They also love to roam the streets with the freedom that comes with being away from home, except that this is one foreign country that feels like home. There is the Pakistani, who drinks with me in a bar and says India feels free, and there is the Pakistani who feels afraid to go out alone in the streets, what if someone finds out he is Pakistani?

Talking to the visiting Pakistanis strangely did not help me understand Pakistan better. But the experience unwittingly taught me that every human being, Indian or Pakistani, is a different entity. The colour of our passports is just one of many things that define our humanity.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 17^th, 2014.

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